Oculus Hand Tracking

“Hand tracking” via link is considered a developer feature by Meta, so there’s a few hoops you need to jump through.

This is only tested with a Quest 2 and a Quest Pro. It probably doesn’t work with a Rift S.

  1. Enable hand tracking in your headset - documentation; hand tracking must work with your headset standalone before it will work with your PC
  2. Set up your account as an Oculus Developer account - documentation - you do not need to allow USB debugging or install the ADB drivers
  3. Restart the Oculus PC software
  4. Enable ‘Developer Runtime Features’ under Settings -> Beta. If you don’t see the option yet, try again later - it can take a few hours
  5. In HTCC settings, set ‘hand tracking source’ to ‘OpenXR Hand Tracking’

Developer Runtime Features option

Meta frequently break PC hand tracking support with firmware/driver updates, or for a random selection of users with experiments. If the steps above don’t work for you, you must use Steam Link or Virtual Desktop instead.

Virtual Desktop

If you choose to use Virtual Desktop instead of Link/AirLink:

  • you must use VDXR
  • turn on ‘send tracking data’ so that your PC - and HTCC - receive the hand tracking data
  • leave hand tracking in Virtual Desktop turned on
  • if you have a Quest Pro, as of 2024-11-26, Virtual Desktop can not enable hand tracking unless face and body tracking are also enabled on your headset

FAQ

Why do pinch gestures require Oculus headsets?

The [XR_FB_hand_tracking_aim] OpenXR extension is required, which is currently only supported by Oculus headsets.

Other headsets would work if other OpenXR runtimes add support for XR_FB_hand_tracking_aim, or if other projects emulate it using [XR_EXT_hand_tracking] or vendor-specific APIs. I am not aware of any projects doing this at present.

Standard OpenXR hand tracking via XR_EXT_hand_tracking does not provide enough similar precise gestures.